Nobel laureate Pinter dies at age 78

Friday

Dec 26, 2008 at 12:01 AM

LONDON (AP) - British Nobel laureate Harold Pinter - who produced some of his generation's most influential dramas and later became a staunch critic of the U.S.-led war in Iraq - has died, his widow said yesterday. He was 78.

Pinter died Wednesday after a long battle with cancer, said his second wife, Antonia Fraser.

In recent years he had seized the platform offered by his 2005 Nobel Literature prize to denounce President George W. Bush, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the war in Iraq.

But he was best known for exposing the complexities of the emotional battlefield. His writing featured cool, menacing pauses in dialogue that reflected his characters' deep emotional struggles and spawned a new adjective found in several dictionaries: "Pinter-esque."

"Pinter restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles," the Nobel Academy said. "With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution."

His characters' internal fears and longings, their guilt and difficult sexual drives were set against the neat lives they constructed to try to survive. Usually enclosed in one room, the acts usually illustrated the characters' lives as a sort of grim game with actions that often contradicted words. Gradually, the layers were peeled back.

"How can you write a happy play?" he once said. "Drama is about conflict and degrees of perturbation, disarray. I've never been able to write a happy play, but I've been able to enjoy a happy life."

Pinter wrote 32 plays; one novel, "The Dwarfs," in 1990; and put his hand to 22 screenplays.

The working-class milieu of his first dramas reflected his early life as the son of a Jewish tailor from London's East End.

"With his earliest work, he stood alone in British theater up against the bewilderment and incomprehension of critics, the audience and writers, too," British playwright Tom Stoppard said when the Nobel Prize was announced.

"I find critics on the whole a pretty unnecessary bunch of people," Pinter once said.

Friend and biographer Michael Billington said Pinter "was a political figure, a polemicist and carried on fierce battles against American foreign policy and often British foreign policy, but in private he was the most incredibly loyal of friends and generous of human beings."

"He was a great man," Billington said.

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